


How they've changed

by AccidentalVillainy



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alternate Universes, F/M, Fixed Points in Time (Doctor Who), Other Additional Tags to Be Added, major character deaths off screen but tagged just in case, time travel will mess with your head, written pre timeless child revelation so we're just gonna ignore that for now
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-13
Updated: 2020-07-10
Packaged: 2021-02-25 21:35:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 9
Words: 2,335
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21782311
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AccidentalVillainy/pseuds/AccidentalVillainy
Summary: There is fall out to traveling with the doctor. No one meets him and is not changed in some way.short pieces about the different companions.
Relationships: Amy Pond/Rory Williams, Martha Jones/Mickey Smith, Metacrisis Tenth Doctor/Rose Tyler, The Doctor (Doctor Who)/Rose Tyler, The Doctor/River Song
Comments: 3
Kudos: 19





	1. Mickey Smith

Mickey Smith is the hero of two worlds.

With the distance of time he couldn’t say he resented the doctor, not really.

If rose had never met the doctor, mickey would never have met Martha, he wouldn’t have had two more years with his grandma, and two worlds could have been lost many times over. Still, traveling with the doctor changed you, and it changed the people around you, something he more than the others had realized. They still worshiped the doctor to an extent, oh sure they knew of his flaws, but they still viewed him first and foremost as the man that showed them the stars, while he had seen the darkness first and found the wonder after. So, he never chased after the doctor, not like the others did, but he still had been changed. Mickey rose’s boyfriend would never have fought off Cybermen and Daleks alike at the battle of canary wharf, he never would have snuck onto the Dalek crucible when planets filled the sky. He’d changed as sure as any of them. Now he ran, ran towards the trouble he’d once run away from. Ran to save others and fight with a strength he’d never known he had. Although he’d never love the doctor the way the others did, he grudgingly thanked him, if only in his mind, for opening him up to what he could be.


	2. River Song

River Song is a timelord.

River Song is a human.

River song is named after herself.

River Song should not exist.

River Song is a living breathing paradox and as such lives her life between the lines of history in the loopholes of space time causality. Her existence is so tenuous that her timeline shudders and shifts around her at the slightest deviation. She can see the very few very set paths of her timeline and knows deep in her bones that the slightest misstep at an important moment could whisk her out of existence. It’s a tightrope walk just trying to stay alive, finding a balance and never showing her fear. So, in the in-betweens, in the moments when time opens up and spreads before her in the multitude of possibilities it presents to the rest of creation, when destiny loosens its hold on her, just a little, and free will filters in. In those moment’s she runs. Runs to chase the freedom she can find, each choice she gets to make that much sweeter for the rarity. So, she chases it, every drop of freedom, every step off the narrow path. Because she loves the doctor, of course she does, but free will is not something anyone passes up. Even for love, even for the doctor.

(This will be a problem one day, standing on a beach, on a day when fate lies heavy in the air, and time holds its breath, on that day she will choose free will over destiny and rewrite what must never be unwritten. For now though, it is her saving grace.)


	3. Martha Jones

Martha Jones is out of sync with time.

The curse of every time traveler, but one that affects her a little stronger than it should. She is out of phase with her surroundings and far too aware of it. Perhaps it is her year living in an alternate universe fraying at the edges barely held together by a paradox machine built by a madman. Those on the ship were shielded to an extent by their proximity to the paradox machine and set apart from the events on earth that necessitated it, but she was the woman who walked the earth. She was right there in the thick of it, an integral part of the history of the year that never was. She’s out of phase now and she feels it. Feels the sun rise far too late, feels the days pass long after they should, like they have already come and she’s living a memory. She finds she knows things, events and happenings before they come. She’s more than a year out of sync with time and some part of her mind is trying to adjust, thrusting her limited human time sense forwards to the point she should be. So, she begins to run, every day faster and faster, moving forwards always forwards, trying to catch up to a self-that’s forever out of reach.


	4. Jack Harkness

Jack was brought back a fixed point, he always has been and always will be. His memory glitters sharply, everything clear cut, not like a memory but like a film, always the same, always sharp and focused. As a fixed point all his actions are become facts and as such have more weight than a normal life. People’s interactions with him fix sharply in their minds, a memory that’s just a little too clear and true. He always left a striking impression but now more than ever he lingers in the mind like a burning after image. On bad days, when time’s in flux and no universe tipping moments are around to make fixed points in time, when it seems he is the only real thing in a universe that cares little for fate, he walks the halls in a daze looking straight through those around him because he’s so real they are mere ghosts in comparison. On other days, when fate is thick in the air and destiny is driving them forwards, on days when time is rigid and driving they see through him because they have more power than he ever will, because even on days like that they can still change, still take time by the reigns and forge a new path, a new destiny, in a way he never will. On days like that he’s not quite real himself. On days like that he runs, runs and runs and runs until his lungs ache and his heart thunders and he feels, if not quite like himself, that at least he is real once more.


	5. Clara Oswin

Clara Oswin was created to save the doctor.

He never saw her, never noticed what had happened. She hadn’t either for what that mattered, just did her job like any other day with the exception of one brief intrusive tug on her subconscious that pulled her attention just enough to change things. After it was done however, after she had input just the right key strokes to stave off the cascade of commands that would have led to the explosion that would have killed him, she wakes up and realizes… that she no longer has any reason to live the life she was living. She didn’t know why but the force that had been driving her entire life up to this point had suddenly cut off. Suddenly free she finds herself with too many memories of too many lives and a yearning she cannot understand. She senses vaguely that she was supposed to die, that now her use is met and her destiny fulfilled she is supposed to die, quiet and tragic, and she feels the words flit through her mind like butterflies “Run you clever boy, and remember”. But she’s not dead yet and what’s more she’s not ready to die. She’s never been quiet and she doesn’t feel tragic, so she takes the advice of the words burned into her brain and runs, runs so far and fast. Not yet dead and so alive and free in a way most people never can be because she has completed her life’s purpose. The one thing in all the world she was created to do was done. She has one thought left burning in her heart, more real and pure than anything she’s ever felt before. She wants to see it all.


	6. Jenny

Jenny, genetic duplicate, time lord bio data improperly formatted onto human hardware. She lives far longer than a clone like her was ever meant to, though she cannot regenerate sometimes when she’s been really badly injured if she’s very still and very calm she’ll glow with an inner light and sometimes it’s enough to heal her. Other times it burns as it tries to fix what was never there, trying to heal pathways that never formed. There is an emptiness in her mind, a nagging silence that rings so loud she tries to drown it, surrounding herself with the voices of companions and talking rapidly and loudly on the edge of hysteria hoping the sound of her own voice will fill the space. Timelords are telepathic and in the days of Galifrey the minds of the other timelords were a constant reassuring hum that stretched through time and space across the universe, now though there is only silence. So though she does not understand, there is an instinctive yearning for something that was never there to miss. But through it all, a mind too empty, and a soul that knows of something more, she runs. She runs across the stars searching, searching for the father she barely knew, searching for the place she might belong.


	7. Rory Williams

Rory never came back quite right, more human than auton but not entirely either. He remembers multiple timelines, multiple realities pressing into each other, struggling to reconcile. He remembers world that was invaded again and again by cybermen, and Daleks and Sontarans, and the Christmas star and the Sycorax. He remembers, growing up in Leadworth with Mels, Amy bright and happy with both her parents. He remembers ancient Rome and his two-thousand-year vigil in a world without stars. He remembers Amy, alone in that big house with only her aunt, never having heard of real aliens till the Doctor. Most of the time he ignores it, but more and more often he can’t remember which reality is real and he’s lost track of which are which. He doesn’t get sick, he doesn’t bleed, and most impactfully, he doesn’t die. Amy lives a long time, longer than many humans but in the end that’s what she is, human, and after sixty-seven years of marriage the lone centurion is alone again. And it hurts. It hurts so that he fears he might shatter from the pain of it, and he rages against his long life, against her death, against the universe itself. In the end though, he runs. Because it’s not really anger that fills him, but anguish, because there is nothing left to wait for, no reason left to stay. The man who waited, displaced through time. Rory Williams, the man who died and died again, unable to die, flees across the earth never able to get far enough, running from a memory.


	8. Alfie "Stormageddon" Owens

Stormageddon grew up to be Alfie and was a mostly normal child. He went to school, made friends, got decent marks, and those who met him were left with the impression of a kind young man with a bright future, if a little prone to daydreaming. The high and mighty self-stylings of his infant self were left by the wayside, and life continued as usual. All in all, life for Alfie was not much different from the life of any of his friends with one key exception, from an early age he knew of the doctor. The stories of how his parents got together and the day he and his father saved the earth were told often, and somewhere deep in his memory was a vision of stars and galaxies and the memory of a voice telling him that they were all right there waiting for him. These stories shaped his childhood, the knowledge that somewhere out there, there really is someone looking out for humanity, that life exists beyond this lonely planet. So, it was perhaps not that much of a surprise when after years of stories and dreaming those stories take root in his mind. And when they ask what he will do with his life, he smiles and takes off with a passion long hidden beneath the surface. He burns through university in two and a half years instead of four, gets his masters in record time, and gets a job in the space program at age twenty. This “perfectly normal” young man suddenly possessed with a drive they had never seen. They tell him to slow down, ask him just what he’s in such a hurry for, but they don’t understand. It’s been in his blood since before he was born, calling to him. His parents wanted nothing more than the earth, He is running to meet the stars.


	9. Rose Tyler

Rose is possessed by the time vortex itself. Time and Space are bound to her will with the sheer force of incredible determination that makes humans so formidable. The first Time Lords developed regeneration from exposure to the untempered schism that looked into the vortex on Gallifrey. Rose also looked into the vortex, unshielded and unfiltered, and the vortex looked back into her. She is the Bad Wolf, she creates and recreates herself, she brings death and she brings life. She can age and she can die but then she is reborn. Over and over a phoenix rising from the ashes in a golden light. The Doctor’s metacrisis self is human in a way that even she isn’t anymore. They live and love and stay together until he dies, but she remains. After ninety years there is nothing left for her on Pete’s world, that strange alternate plane of existence where she was never meant to exist. Her love has died a human death, her family’s gone as well. There’s nothing left to connect her to that reality she’d never quite settled right there just a little too out of place like the universe itself knew she didn’t belong. So now she is going back. She is going back to her Doctor, and nothing will stop her. She may be trapped across the stars, across time, in another dimension, but don’t you dare think for one second that will hold her.

The Bad Wolf is coming back, running across the stars, and there is nothing that can stop her.


End file.
